Jasmina Tesanovic: dispatch from Amsterdam.

Essay by Jasmina Tesanovic follows. Photos by Bruce Sterling. See also this related AP report: Link.

This is not The Hague, this is Amsterdam. This is not
a juvenile emigrants' prison but a designer hotel, one
of the most extravagant in Europe. Every sleeping
room is different. The public space is amazing: a
Kakfaesque designer labyrinth.

The Lloyd Hotel is quite literally a redesigned
prison. It once held teenage boys, foreigners, under
a notoriously harsh regime. My room resembles the
prison cell that my indicted ex president Milosevic
had in The Hague's war crimes tribunal. It features
thick bare walls, a shower barely exposed right in the
middle of the room, and a toilet as a hermetic cabin.
The room's fourth wall is open glass, exposed to the
world, or, rather, the opened spaces and uncurtained
windows of Dutch tower blocks.

The local residents, people of Amsterdam, are
eating, drinking, watching TV in their uncurtained
windows. A couple of blocks away from my hotel,
women of all ages, half nude in hooker lingerie, are
sitting in windows casually selling their bodies with
the utmost indifference. Women of color, mostly,
small and plump… The Dutch girls on the streets of
Amsterdam are big, blonde, hefty girls, indifferent to
the male gaze. The smell of hashish is pervasive. The
bicycle people are invasive: the local bikes are
extravagantly complicated Dutch devices, like a
perversion on wheels.

At the Stifo conference, my favorite speaker
is a female biotech enthusiast, who speaks of a
future where we will be able to eat those we love
without hurting them. Thanks to 21st-century
meat-production technologies, we will be able to
produce from one cell of their body a delicious
nutritious meal!

Who do you love? My companion at dinner is a
young filmmaker who just came from LA. There she shot
a scene with a plastic surgeon specializing in vaginal
esthetics. The doctor tells all: the demand on the
ground is for the reconstructed vagina of a teenage
girl.

In the Amsterdam red-light zone, an NGO founded
by an ex-prostitute offers us guided tours of the
sex-work district.

Just outside that district I notice the office
of War Child, Brian Eno's NGO for help to the stricken
areas in the world. I see the name of Kosovo, among
other areas. It is gusty weather in Holland, harshly
rainy then starkly sunny: a huge glittering rainbow
embraces this city, this Euro-Babylon where the name
Jasmine, I am told, has become a choice name for the
children of hippies.

Well, not hippie children, strictly speaking.
That can't be possible at this late date. They must
mean hippie grandchildren.

– – – – –

Jasmina Tesanovic is an author, filmmaker, and wandering thinker who shares her thoughts with BoingBoing from time to time. Email: politicalidiot at yahoo dot com. Her blog is here.

Previous essays by Jasmina Tesanovic on BoingBoing:

Where are your Americans now?

Anna Politkovskaya Silenced
Slaughter in the Monastery

Mermaid's Trail

A Burial in Srebenica
Report from a concert by a Serbian war criminal
To Hague, to Hague

Preachers and Fascists, Out of My Panties

Floods and Bombs


Scorpions Trial, April 13
The Muslim Women 
– Belgrade: New Normality
Serbia: An Underworld Journey
Scorpions Trial, Day Three: March 15, 2006
Scorpions Trial, Day Two: March 14, 2006
Scorpions Trial, Day One: March 13, 2006
The Long Goodbye
Milosevic Arrives in Belgrade
Slobodan Milosevic Died
Milosevic Funeral